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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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White House for reasons of security." The press
interpreted this as meaning that there was fear I would put personal pressure
on Brandt about Achenbach.
At any rate, on Thursday the 9th, the
international press reacted as we had hoped it would. The Hamburg daily, Die
Welt, headlined: "Achenbach's Candidacy Attacked in Paris and Brussels
B.K. Touring Europe Again." The Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung:
"B.K. on the Move to Expose Achenbach's Past." The Hannoversche Presse:
"B.K. Attacks Achenbach." In Italy, Il Messagero's headline on the day
after a meeting in Rome between Scheel and Foreign Minister Aldo Moro was:
"Astonishment and Anger in Brussels Over a Nazi EEC Candidate." The Brussels
Le Soir wrote:
The German Foreign Minister's usual self
confidence, which has so easily and efficiently allayed the hostility of other
European countries, seems to have considerably diminished. At any rate, it
appears that Achenbach insists there is no difference between Hitler's Europe
and the Common Market's, and that he thinks the expertise he acquired in the
former is enough to recommend him for the latter. Instead of
flying to Washington, I spent the day in the Bonn Press Building going from one
office to another with my data while Arno ran up and down the corridors. I left
an exposé with Horst Ehmke, the Chancellery minister who had given me
the helpful advice during the 1968 Kiesinger affair: "Don't treat it as a legal
matter; make it political."
In the evening we left for Paris and
arrived on April 10. We went back to work at once in the CDJC archives. As far
as the press and public opinion were concerned, the whole Achenbach case rested
on one document: the notorious telegram Achenbach sent on February 1, 1943, to
the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. It said:
On February 13, 1943, about 11:10 P.M.,
Lieutenant Colonel Winkler and Major Nussbaum, Chief of Staff of the
Luftwaffe's Third Division, were shot from behind while walking from their
office to their hotel a short distance from the Louvre Bridge over the Seine,
which they had just crossed. Winkler was wounded by three bullets; Nussbaum by
two. They died the same night. Seven 7.65 mm. cartridges were found near the
scene of the crime, and presumably came from the same gun. The whereabouts of
the assassins is being investigated. The first reprisal will be the arrest and
deportation of 2,000 Jews
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 104 |
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